Tag: Reporters Without Borders

As mentioned by Jindrich on Twitter, it seems that the entity or entities behind the watering hole attacks don’t care to be caught or detected and it also seems that they don’t care if the Internet Explorer and Java vulnerability are patched. They act as the opportunists and try to take advantage from the timeframe between the patch release and the patch application of some users, companies and non-governmental organizations.

It seems that one week later, Reporters Without Borders, a French-based international non-governmental organization that advocates freedom of the press and freedom of information, is the new web site used for the watering hole campaign. Such an organization is an ideal target for watering hole campaign, as it seems right now the miscreants concentrate only on human rights/political sites – many Tibetian, some Uygur, and some political parties in Hong Kong and Taiwan which are the latest hits in this operation. In our opinion the finger could be safely pointed to China (again).

Like for the Hong Kong political party, the english version of RWB was doing a javascript inclusion to “hxxp://en.rsf.org/local/cache-js/m.js“.

The “m.js” file creates a cookie “Somethingbbbbb” with one day expiration date. The cookie name could be linked to the Hong Kong political party “m.js” cookie name which was “Somethingeeee“. This kind of cookies was already used two years ago in similar attacks with different exploits.

If Internet Explorer 8 is used an iframe is loaded from”hxxp://newsite.acmetoy.com/m/d/pdf.html” file. Otherwise two iframes will load “hxxp://98.129.194.210/CFIDE/debug/includes/java.html“ and “hxxp://newsite.acmetoy.com/m/d/javapdf.html“.

newsite.acmetoy.com analysis

“newsite.acmetoy.com” web site is hosting the following CVE-2012-4792 related files:

98.129.194.210 analysis

“98.129.194.210” web site is hosting the following Java vulnerabilities related files, as you can see, they’re completely same as the above and most probably serve only as a backup server in case of takedown.

A14CCC5922EFC6C7CEC1BB58C607381C99967ED4B7602B7427B081209AAF1656 is an interesting injector which downloads something which pretends to be an error webpage, decodes its content which is in fact position independent code which is later injected to another process. This is also RAT, contacting “d.wt.ikwb.com” (58.64.179.139, Hong Kong).

We’ve contacted RSF webmaster and the code should be already removed. Avast and other anti-virus product users are protected on multiple levels against this threat, also updating to latest versions of the vulnerable software packages is a must. Or getting rid of them, as most users can safely replace MSIE with another browser and completely uninstalling Java, reducing the attack surface.

Through a collaboration with (Jindrich Kubec (@Jindroush), Director of Threat Intelligence at avast! / Eric Romang (@eromang), independent security researcher), we can confirm that the watering hole campaigns are still ongoing, targeting multiple web high value web sites, including as example a major Hong Kong political party. We can also confirm that a second major Hong Kong political party is victim of this watering hole campaign.

We will provide you further details on the affected web sites after their cleaning.

Chinese language version of the targeted web site is doing a remote javascript inclusion to “hxxp://www.[REDACTED].org/board/data/m/m.js“.

This website is a legitimate compromised website used for hosting the exploit files, hosted in South Korea.

This include file uses the well-known “deployJava” function, aka “deployJava.js“, and creates a cookie “Somethingeeee” with one day expiration date. This cookie is quite strange and it’s also possible to find it in years old exploits, which suggests this is only a part of greater, long-going operation.

If Internet Explorer 8 is used , an iframe is load from”hxxp://www.[REDACTED].org/board/data/m/mt.html” file. Otherwise and if Oracle Java is detected, an iframe will load “hxxp://www.[REDACTED].org/board/data/m/javamt.html“.

Comparing to the original CFR and Capstone Turbine versions, this code is not targeting certain browser supported language, but the code is based on the version used on CFR with “boy” and “girl” patterns.

The executable file can be extracted from the string by cutting of first 13 characters, converting hex chars to binary and xoring the whole binary blob with 0xBF. Resulting file with SHA256 CE6C5D2DCF5E9BDECBF15E95943F4FFA845F8F07ED2D10FD6E544F30A9353AD2 is RAT which is communicating with a domain hosted in Hong Kong by New World Telecom.